


the ceiling of our day

by dirtybinary



Series: The Second Interstellar Punic War [1]
Category: Ancient History RPF, Punic Wars RPF
Genre: Alternate History - Hannibal Wins, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 12:47:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13031442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: Hannibal and Scipio fight the Second Interstellar Punic War. On the same side.





	the ceiling of our day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sevenofspade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/gifts).



> My recipient suggested (a) Hannibal and Scipio on the same side, (b) Hannibal winning, and (c) IN SPAAAAAACE, so this is three AUs for the price of one. Happy Yuletide, sevenofspade! I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I loved writing it.
> 
> Historical notes and explanations are at the end of the fic.

**i. 216 BCE**

“This way,” says the ensign, as Scipio steps out of the _Neptune_ ’s cockpit. “He’s expecting you.”

Cannae is unsettling in more ways than one. A fortnight after the battle, the debris from the wrecked Roman fleet has coalesced into a cloud so dense it blots out the sun, turning the moonlet’s skies the dull red of an inflamed wound. The ensign—a Gaul, by the looks of her—escorts Scipio to a berth near the back of the Carthaginian hangar, where a team of mahouts is doing repairs on the famous elephantine flagship. “The Capuan envoy, sir.”

On the battlefield, the elephantines are a horrifying sight, all tusk-shaped rams and blazing guns. At rest, though, this one looks almost peaceful, its trunk-cannon swishing from side to side in the slight breeze, its twin ventilators flapping and revolving like massive ears. There’s a man perched high up on the prow, overseeing the replacement of a broken antenna. He glances down, stroking the elephantine’s hull the way one might pet a house cat, and to Scipio’s astonishment the ear-like ventilators give a placid answering twitch. Then the man puts aside his tools, slithers down from the prow, and lands neatly in front of him.

Scipio left Capua with a carefully prepared speech, full of elegant meanders and cruising pleasantries, which he’d had to recite to perfection a dozen times before his father would let him onto the launchpad. But now every word of it flies out of his head, and the first thing he says to Hannibal Barca is, “Is your ship _sentient_?”

The mahouts titter. Hannibal smiles, just a little. He’s young, far younger than any of the Roman generals Scipio has had to follow. Dark curls; slight scruff; no badge or sigil on his flight suit, so he looks just like any other officer in the fleet. His headcloth is tilted at a jaunty angle to cover his blind eye. “He’s called Surus,” he says, in near-perfect Latin. “And you must be Publius Cornelius.”

A truly Punic response, Scipio thinks with annoyance, since it answers nothing at all. “You know me?”

“You were hard to miss,” says Hannibal, “at the Ticinus.”

This, then, is the man who sailed his battlefleet through the Alpine star cluster, braving the violent radiation in the heart of a hollowed-out asteroid. It should not matter that he knows Scipio’s name, recognises him from a brief moment of boyish bravery nearly two years ago, but it does. “The elders of my city sent me with a message,” says Scipio firmly, before he can be sidetracked. “We’ll let you land on Capua if you can protect us from the Romans.”

The tittering is louder this time. A number of small Gallic moons have gone over to the Carthaginians, some with more enthusiasm than others, but as yet none of the planets in the Italian system have joined them. Someone says, “We could be there in a fortnight,” and a lieutenant adds, frowning, “There’s a Roman fleet in orbit at Casilinum. We’d have to get past them first.” 

“Eight quinqueremes, twelve triremes,” Scipio agrees. “Not much of a challenge for you, I’m afraid.”

Two can play at flattery. Unfortunately, Hannibal pays no heed to any of this. He’s still watching Scipio with his brow furrowed, as if the presence of twenty enemy ships is only a trifling nuisance set against a more pressing puzzle. “Cornelius is an old patrician name,” he says. “A _Roman_ name. You’re rather far afield from the Seven Moons.”

It’s like being dissected under a laser. Scipio returns the keen stare with his own. “I am.”

“So,” says Hannibal, “how do I know I can trust you?”

Scipio could say a great many things—that his branch of the family has lived in Capua since Alexander’s day; that when he leapt untethered out the airlock to pull his father from the wreckage of his stricken ship, not one of the Roman pilots lifted a finger to help; that he’s had more than enough of being led into disaster—but he doesn’t see that this foreign conqueror has any business interrogating him on his loyalties. “You don’t,” he says. “You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Do you want Capua or not?” 

The lieutenant drops his face into his hands. Surus’ exhaust pipe lets out a belch that, if Scipio thinks hard enough about it, could sound almost like a chuckle. It’s a gamble. He’s seen the size of the army, the bare, ghostly crags of the moonlet. He knows they can’t stay here much longer if they don’t want to starve. Even so, when Hannibal turns to climb back onto Surus, Scipio thinks at first that he’s miscalculated. 

“You heard our friend,” says Hannibal, picking up his tools again. “Capua calls, and we answer. Launch is at five hundred hours. Stop gawking and get some sleep.”

His gaze finds Scipio’s, and a sudden smile darts across his face, like a satyr’s or a sphinx’s. “You’re brave, young envoy. I hope you’re ready to demolish twenty Roman ships.”

 

  

Scipio is, and he proves it.

Three days later, half the enemy fleet is breaking apart and spiralling into the gas-giant gravity of Casilinum. The other half chases them some distance farther in a blaze of artillery, until Hannibal himself goes out on Surus’ gun deck and does something inexplicable with a contraption of mirrors. The Roman flagship seems to suffer a power surge from its solar panels, and soon the pursuit falls behind.

“What in Jupiter’s name was that?” asks Scipio over their commslink. His own ship’s guns are still smoking.

Hannibal shows him the contraption through the video screen. “Archimedes of Syracuse lent it to me.”

He’s got that smirk again, like a schoolboy with a bagful of sweets. There’s something irresistible about it, and Scipio has to shut off the commslink before his own smile becomes unseemly.

 

 

They all have the feeling that Hannibal would much rather be off again as soon as affairs in Capua are settled, but his ships need repairs and his troops rest, and so—half by design and half by default—Scipio’s family winds up playing host to him for the winter.

It’s a peculiar arrangement. The first few days, Scipio has to fend off a constant stream of questions about their guest. “Did you ride in the elephantine?” Lucius demands, and Cornelia Major says, “Never mind that, did he let you _fly_ the elephantine?” and their mother muses, hopefully, “I wonder if he's married,” and little Cornelia Minor says, “Let's betroth Publius to him!” and Scipio has to shush them prodigiously before Hannibal overhears.

As usual, Laelius is the only one with anything useful to say. “There’s a conspiracy,” he warns Scipio in an undertone, when they’re alone in the atrium. “Pacuvius’ son is going to stab your friend at dinner tonight and give the city over to the Romans. You know him, his father’s got wealthy patrons on the Capitoline.”

“What? Where is he now?” 

“Plotting at Sthenius’ house,” says Laelius. “They asked me to join them and I said I had to think about it.” 

Scipio regards the idea at arm’s length, as one might a spider. Aside from the sheer treachery, it also sounds like the worst plot ever conceived. The city is full of Carthaginians, and the closest Roman fleet is weeks away. He considers telling his father, but it would be an affront to a senator’s honour even to have to countenance such a rumour. “They’re not being subtle, are they? Don’t breathe a word to anyone, I’m going to go bang their heads together.”

Laelius glances towards the manor library, where Hannibal has been ensconced with a shelf of meteorological treatises all afternoon. “Shouldn’t we warn him?”

Scipio remembers the laser stare, and how it had felt like being skinned and taxidermied. “Oh, he knows.”

He steals the keys to his mother’s hovercraft, and before he can think twice about it he’s pulling up outside Sthenius’ house and bursting into the study where the conspirators are plotting.

There are a half-dozen of them, all around his age, faces upturned to him like a flurry of shocked mimosas. “Ah, Scipio,” says young Pacuvius. “We were just about to—” 

“Breach all the laws of _xenia_ and murder my guest-friend in my home?” Scipio suggests. He looks around the study, at the computers and astrolabes and hologram projectors, and tries to decide where he would position a camera if he were one of Hannibal’s spies. “And give our city up to the Romans?”

They exchange looks. No one will meet his eye, but Sthenius mutters, “At least we haven’t brought barbarians through the gates.”

Later Scipio will wonder at the workings of divine inspiration. One moment he’s looking at the antique sword hanging on the study wall, and the next he’s jumping up on the desk to pull it from its sheath. “So I did,” he says. The conspirators scramble back, some drawing knives, Sthenius a sonic gun he must have stolen from the hangar armoury. The thought scuds into Scipio’s head that perhaps he ought to be alarmed, and leaves again just as quickly. He brandishes the sword at one of them. “Wasn’t your brother freed without ransom after Trasimene? And you”—he points at another—“wasn’t your father’s ship blown up at Cannae while the consul was busy running away? I’d know, I was there. Anyone can see that Hannibal is more gracious an enemy than the Romans are friends.”

Pacuvius says, pleadingly, “Scipio—”

“If you turn on him,” says Scipio, “you turn on our city. And if you turn on our city, this sword is against you. By Jupiter, I swear I’ll fight at his side till I see Capua restored as queen over all Italy and free from the power of Rome, and gods help anyone who tries to stop me.”

He aims the point of the sword at Pacuvius’ throat. It isn’t even sharp, but no one seems to notice. “Now you repeat after me. All of you. Or you’ll find me a far worse foe than Hannibal could ever be.” 

They swear, just as he knew they would. They put down their weapons and repeat after him, binding themselves to his oath with archaic imprecations: _or let the Furies devour me, and let my name and my family’s name be swallowed in Lethe forever._ “And as for Hannibal,” Scipio adds for good measure, “if you want to stab him, you’ll have to do it right through me.”

He throws down the sword and turns to go, feeling decidedly heroic, and altogether pleased with himself. 

It’s dark by the time he gets outside. In the west, the sky is rosy with the last echoes of sunset; in the east, hued turquoise by the shimmering dust-clouds of the Campanian nebula. By twilight, the garden seems rather more crowded than it was when he arrived. He runs into a shadowy figure, and a hand catches his arm. His fist is already swinging up for a punch when a familiar voice—gilded with laughter, and very close to his ear—says, “If it isn’t the man of the hour.”

Hannibal releases his arm. Scipio drops his fist. His eyes adjust to the darkness, and pick out a perimeter of person-shaped silhouettes ringing the house: Numidian scouts mostly, with a few officers in the midst. “When did you arrive?”

“Only just,” says Hannibal. The warmth of his body, only two inches away, is diabolical. “Don’t worry. I didn’t miss anything.”

He holds up a tiny wireless speaker, no doubt synced with the bug his spies must have planted in Sthenius’ study. Scipio looks at it with disdain. “No visual? I even waved a sword around and everything.”

“I’ll use my imagination,” says Hannibal. “I’m sure you were very dashing.”

There’s a teasing glint in his good eye. Scipio doesn’t remember now if the iris was always this green, or if it’s just a trick of the light from the nebula. His breath leaves his lungs. It’s enough to make him wish he’d punched Hannibal after all. “I knew,” he says, recollecting himself with effort, “you’d want to see if I’d join them.”

“And you wanted me in your debt,” says Hannibal. “So we both have what we came for. Gods preserve us from angry young men who love their cities.”

Much the same might be said of Hannibal. Scipio does not make the point. “What are you going to do with them?”

“Nothing,” says Hannibal. “I think you’ve more than scared them into submission.”

As if to prove it, he says something in Punic, and his guards break up the perimeter and withdraw to the street. They are alone in the dark, still close enough to touch. Scipio takes a judicious step back. His pulse had been steady the whole time he was confronting Pacuvius’ gang, but he feels it leaping away in his throat now, like the frantic distress signals that flooded the radars after Cannae. “I meant you to hear me,” he says. “But I also meant what I said." 

“I know,” says Hannibal. He’s taken a step back too, a delicate mirroring of Scipio’s retreat. “That’s the most terrifying thing about you.” 

“So you still doubt me?”

“Oh, I trust you,” says Hannibal. “More than I should. In fact, since it appears I am no longer about to be stabbed, perhaps you could join me in your father’s library tonight. I miss having someone clever enough to argue with.”

Scipio arches a brow. “What do you want to argue about?”

Hannibal shrugs. “Orbital dynamics?”

The satyr-smile is still playing on his lips. Under such conditions Scipio does not trust himself to remember his own name, let alone say anything witty, so he only inhales, and exhales, and throws open the door of the hovercraft. “In that case,” he says, “I hope you’ve read your Aristotle.”

 

 

**ii. 211 BCE**

The Romans lead a fleet against Capua, of course they do, and of course they do it when Hannibal is off blockading Tarentum’s endless catalogue of moons on the far side of the Italian system, and the citizens are left to fend for themselves. “Don’t surrender,” says Hannibal, urgent, on the video screen in the Senate House. He seems to look directly at Scipio when he says it. “ _Don’t surrender._ I’m going to”—and then the line goes dead.

Bombs rattle the fortified walls of the hangar. Low-orbit Roman ships speckle the sky with ominous new constellations. “Give him time,” says Scipio, scanning the radars over his father’s shoulder. “Tarentum’s over two weeks from here.”

“It’s _been_ two weeks,” says his father. He’s pale and drawn like he hasn’t been since the Ticinus, but he still manages to sound gentle when he adds, “You know him, Publius. He’s pragmatic enough to cut his losses if he thinks Capua is unsalvageable.”

He is. But that doesn’t stop Scipio from watching the skies, and bloodying a few noses the next time someone suggests surrendering.

 

 

Help does come, in the end. The consul breaks off the assault overnight and goes tearing back to Rome for no reason anyone can discern, taking most of his fleet with him. In the breathing-room that ensues, Scipio commandeers a few ships and drives off the remaining invaders. He doesn’t have permission, but by the time anyone finds out he’s already landing with some twenty captured quinqueremes in tow, and nobody has any objections after that.

Only later do they learn the reason for the Romans' retreat. Scipio isn't surprised, only jealous he hadn't thought of it first.

When the Carthaginian fleet finally arrives late that night, he takes a shuttle up to meet them, and drifts—weightless in zero gravity—into Surus' engine room. "A fine idea, feinting on Rome," he says. "I only wish it had been for real."

Hannibal looks up. He’s in a crowd of mahouts and ensigns, reading reports, supervising the repair of a circuit panel with what appears to be duct tape and rubber bands, and having bits of shrapnel picked out of his shoulder by the ship’s surgeon Sosylus. “How are things on the ground?”

Scipio decides not to mention the enormous hole in the roof of the Senate House, or the batches of cyanide pills the city’s apothecaries have been manufacturing. There is something important he came up here to say, and sentiment will only derail it. “We’re all right. How’s your shoulder?”

Hannibal frowns at it, as if just remembering its existence. Not very long ago, he’d been in orbit around Rome, where—if the rumours are true—he’d landed Surus practically on top of the Colline Gate, and only been dislodged after a six-hour firefight. “It’s not so bad.”

“That’s Phoenician for _I’m in excruciating pain_ ,” Sosylus informs Scipio, with a rather mirthless grin. “He’s lucky his arm isn’t broken.”

“It’s the only thing on this blasted ship that isn’t,” says Hannibal, closing his floating screens with an impatient flick. Surus’ thrusters give a cranky grumble, as if in assent. “Leave us. I’ll see to my own damned shoulder.”

Scipio holds out his hand for the tweezers. “I’ll do it.”

Sosylus leaves with a sigh, herding the ensigns out with him. Scipio straps himself into the surgeon’s vacated chair and gets to work. “The Romans will be back, you know,” he says, when they’re alone. “They always come back.”

“And the sun is hot, and the universe is quite large.”

The shrapnel cuts are deep and raw, but that’s not the reason for Hannibal’s mood. In the porthole between them, the blue-green crystal that is Capua looks small and fragile on its bed of stars, as if it might shatter at a thought. “I couldn’t get in touch with you,” says Hannibal, half under his breath. “All your satellites were dead. I thought—”

Scipio looks up, waiting, but Hannibal changes the subject with sudden brusqueness. “Be honest. Did you think I would abandon the city?” 

It feels like a triumph, how steady his hands are on Hannibal’s fevered skin. He works loose a microfragment of glass, and chooses his words with the same precision as his tweezers. “We held on till you came. That’s all that matters.”

“I didn’t know if you would,” says Hannibal.

The terse line of his neck reminds Scipio of an exposed wire, pulled taut and fraying. Carthage has not been forthcoming with money or ships or supplies, and of late he has started to doubt if there is anything holding the army together besides Hannibal’s iron will. Under enough strain, he thinks, even iron will break before it bends. “We can’t win like this,” he says. “Not even you can defend every planet and moon in Italy from them. The only way to end this is to take Rome itself.”

“I _know_ ,” says Hannibal. He keeps his face averted, as though the twin intimacies of eye contact and Scipio’s fingers on his open wound would be too much to bear at once. “It’s a floating fortress. I’ve just seen it. We don’t have the strength to take it by storm.”

Scipio pulls out another glistening shard, and studies its ragged edges for a moment. “Weren’t your brothers supposed to be here with reinforcements years ago?”

Hannibal gives a short, pained laugh. “Didn’t you hear? The Romans made a big show of sending another fleet to Spain while I was parked right before their walls. New Carthage is all but overrun. Hasdrubal has more than enough to deal with as it is.”

“So he’s not coming?” 

“I don’t blame him,” says Hannibal, in a voice that makes it quite plain that he does.

Scipio traces a finger around the edges of the wound. He remembers, with the clarity of a frame-by-frame replay, the instant the firebombs stopped raining down on the hangar roof; how the lights of the enemy ships had faded one by one as they pulled out of orbit, while the defenders wept and sang grateful hymns to Minerva. Afterwards, they’d decrypted the urgent message from Rome that had prompted the consul’s sudden retreat. It said, quite simply, _HANNIBAL AD PORTAS_.

He knows the magnitude of the debt he owes. It’s not a feeling he relishes.

He judges the moment, and lines up his crosshairs. “Send me to Spain,” he says. “I can do more good for you there than here.”

Surus’ engine gives a loud sputter. Hannibal turns sharply, near wrenching his shoulder from Scipio’s grasp. “Send you?” 

“Why not?” asks Scipio. “Am I too young? Too inexperienced?” He cocks his head, letting mockery sharpen each syllable. “Too Roman?”

Hannibal says, “Too needed.”

The topography of his voice has always been a complex one, with its subtle, well-veiled inflections. Even under his intent gaze, it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. “I watched the footage from the siege,” he says. “I’ve never seen anyone command a fleet like you. There were sixty ships blockading Capua and you drove them off with a handful of half-crewed triremes.” 

In the sudden quiet, every creak and drag of Surus’ rusty hull sounds like a thunderclap. The air smells of scorched metal and short circuits. Scipio pauses to regroup, taking slow, deliberate breaths, his fingertips just brushing the skin of Hannibal’s arm. “I was at Cannae,” he says. “I learnt from a master.”

“You did, all right,” says Hannibal. “The trouble is—”

The contours of a small smile are just beginning to gather at the edges of his mouth. “The trouble is, I’ve grown superstitious about letting you out of my sight. Like a lucky ring one gets used to carrying around.”

Scipio has to smile, too. “Like Polycrates of Samos,” he says. “But as I recall, when he threw his lucky ring into the sea, it came back to him in the mouth of a fish.”

Hannibal levels him with one of his searching looks. Slowly, he plucks the tweezers from Scipio’s hand and lets them float away. “Is that how you propose to come back to me?”

“If I have to,” says Scipio. The wound is clean now, the last of the shrapnel gone. He has no excuse to keep holding on to Hannibal’s arm. He holds on, anyway. “I _will_ come back. With your brothers and your reinforcements, once I’ve chased the Romans out of Spain. Just wait for me.” 

The engine fizzes again. Hannibal strokes a corner of the circuitboard, murmuring something full of cradlesong vowels, and the elephantine quietens. His expression has taken on a softer cast, but Scipio doesn’t think Surus is the only reason. “I sometimes think,” says Hannibal, “the gods have no sense of balance. Otherwise they would have put us on opposing sides.”

When Scipio was a little boy, his uncle Gnaeus had taken him to Rome to see Claudius Marcellus dedicate the _spolia opima_ , the trophies he’d won defeating a Gallic pilot in single combat. Perched wide-eyed on the roof of his uncle’s hovercraft, watching the cheering crowds and the dancing lasers and the fireworks filling the sky with red and gold, he’d wondered how the victorious commander must have felt, fêted like a king for a day.

He thinks he knows, now.

“Well, they sent me to you,” he says. “That must mean they’re on your side. Will you let me go to Spain or not?”

Hannibal laughs. It’s a bright, brash sound, quick and catching as wildfire. “Let you?” he says. “I doubt if anyone could stop you.”

 

 

Two weeks later, Scipio is on the launchpad, ready to take off.

Aside from Laelius, his legate, it’s a family affair: Lucius is there as copilot, Cornelia as chief engineer, their cousin Bignose as navigator. Their parents come to see them off, their faces a study in pride and trepidation; and Hannibal is there as well, watching them file aboard the _Neptune_. “Great gods,” he says. “Are they all called Scipio too? I think you need a new name.” 

Scipio laughs. There are no fewer than six Hannibals and twice as many Hannos on Surus’ crew alone, and they both know it. “Like what?”

“We’ll make something up,” says Hannibal.

Under the brittle shimmer of mirth, his face is serious. They stop by the gangway for a moment of privacy, next to the altar where the laser-killed sacrifices raise fragrant spires of smoke to the sky. So too might the Greeks have sacrificed when they launched a fleet across the wine-dark sea of the cosmos for the first time, in pursuit of the strangers who’d come down from the stars and stolen Helen; so too Dido of Old Earth looking for a new home; so too Alexander as he circumnavigated the galaxy, conquering as he went. “What are you thinking?” Scipio asks.

“I’m thinking,” says Hannibal, “nine light-years is a long way to be from home.”

He looks so weary, like a Hercules sore from lopping off hydra heads. The unwelcome thought slinks into Scipio’s mind that he might be making a fatal mistake, going off to Spain. Together, he and Hannibal are invincible; apart, they are only mortal, and frail. “That never stopped you.” 

“Indeed,” says Hannibal. “I wonder what manner of person you will be when you come back.” 

Scipio tells himself that the lump in his throat is only excitement, the restless stirrings in his stomach just pre-launch nerves. He looks out at the faces of his parents, small as dots; at the columns and spires of Capua in the distance, gleaming emerald-green under a sky aglow with holographic billboards; at Hannibal himself, standing at his side under the belly of the ship; and wonders which he’ll miss most.

“Kiss me,” he says. “For luck.”

He isn’t serious. All the same, Hannibal leans in and kisses him on the mouth: a gentle press of lips, formal as a salute, there and gone again. Scipio barely has the chance to register it before it’s over. “May Fortune go with you,” says Hannibal. Then he turns away rather swiftly, and steps off the launchpad.

His mouth still tingling, Scipio climbs into the _Neptune_ ’s cockpit. To look back at Hannibal now would be too honest an admission, one he will never be able to retract, and so he only straps himself in for takeoff and turns his attention to the dashboard controls. Nobody, not even Laelius, seems to notice that anything ground-shaking has occurred. “All clear, Captain,” says Cornelia, and Scipio says, “Start the countdown.” 

The quinquereme lifts off, not as ponderous as an elephantine, but not light either. It’s as if the ship has to break free not just from Capua’s gravity, but Hannibal’s too.

  

 

**iii. 207 BCE**

It’s a long journey to Spain, but an even longer one back.

Hannibal is supposed to link up with the convoy of reinforcements as they emerge from the Alpine cluster into Italy. He doesn’t show. Then not one but both Roman consuls descend on them near the Metaurus asteroids, and they’re outnumbered and hemmed in by enemy ships to port and starboard, and Scipio has fought alongside Hasdrubal Barca long enough by this point to know that he will fly their entire fleet into the sun rather than let the Romans get their hands on him or his beloved elephantines, if matters come to that pass. 

It is, to say the least, not quite the homecoming Scipio envisioned.

He radios the flagship, his hands tight on the _Neptune_ ’s tiller. “Starboard column’s getting close,” he warns. “That’s Claudius Nero’s squadron. But it’s an odd trajectory if he’s trying to flank us.” 

The flagship flashes its signalling lights, and the elephantines close ranks, turning to meet the enemy ships sweeping up from starboard. They’re an audacious sight, like Roman fleets always are: arrayed in perfect geometric formation, each vessel prowed like an eagle’s beak, fuselage trimmed in shining crimson and emblazoned with _S.P.Q.R._ in bright gold letters. “Nero was fighting Hannibal in the Lucanian sector last we heard,” Hasdrubal radios back, sounding crackly and far-off. “The hell is he doing here?”

With a captain’s instincts, Scipio feels rather than sees his crew exchange a flurry of uneasy looks. They’re all watching him, young Celtiberian recruits for the most part, waiting to see what he’ll do, likely cursing him for not opting to take the easier route through the Balearics with Laelius and Mago and the second convoy. Lucius murmurs—in Latin, so they won’t understand—“You don’t think something’s happened to Hannibal, do you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Scipio. “The only person who could defeat him is standing in front of you.”

The fact is, what with their unreliable satellite relays, anything could have happened without their hearing about it. After all they’ve seen on campaign—the solar storms, the hard-fought victories, the voyage through the Alps—it seems an irony worthy of Euripides that they’re now facing utter annihilation on the doorstep of Italy itself. “All right, no more bellyaching,” says Scipio through the ship’s translator. “If Hannibal said he’ll meet us, he’ll meet us. All guns to starboard. First one to shoot down a Roman ship gets to name my elephantine.”

To give the crew credit, there’s a furious scramble to get into position. Scipio almost doesn’t notice when Cornelia pokes her head into the cockpit and says, “ _That’s_ no Roman ship.”

The neat line of Nero’s squadron is breaking up, the eagle-beaked ships veering out of formation for a bigger vessel to come to the forefront. It’s an elephantine. It’s Surus, tusk rams glinting, guns bristling from every deck, gliding between the smaller quinqueremes like a fishfin through water. Apart from himself, Scipio knows only one pilot who could fly a ship like that. He stares at the radar, not even daring to hope, but Surus doesn’t show up on it at all. “Digital camouflage,” says Cornelia, impressed. 

Scipio radios the flagship again. “Are you seeing this?”

There’s a violent squelch of static. “That’s not Claudius Nero,” says Hasdrubal. “Damn his teeth, that’s my brother.”

Surus’ trunk-cannon swishes in greeting. Hasdrubal’s flagship returns the wave with a joyous gurgle of engines. Scipio remembers something he's read about the elephants of Old Earth recognising their own kin even after years apart, and he thinks, half distracted in a haze of wonder, that the ships _are_ sentient. And then Surus wheels and charges, leading his squadron into the dissolving _triplex acies_ of the main Roman line, and something tight and painful comes unravelled in the vicinity of his chest.

“Crew,” he says. “Battlestations.”

 

 

The fleet limps into the hangar at Canusium, battered but for the most part intact, and Hannibal meets them in a muggy crater on the moon’s overheated surface. Scipio hangs back at first—he’s curious to watch the brothers reunite, and he’s picked up enough Punic to follow the gist of the conversation. “We feared the worst,” says Hasdrubal. “You could have sent a message.”

“They would have intercepted it,” says Hannibal. Scipio is momentarily stricken by how much older he looks, his face bitten deep with worry lines, as though a lifetime has come and gone; how, without the usual glimmer of mischief in his eye, he can look so forbidding. “Anyway, I didn’t think you’d ever get here. You’re only about a decade late.” 

“Yes,” says Hasdrubal, equally stony. “I was defending our father’s grave. _One_ of us had to.”

A tense silence falls. For an instant, Scipio fancies they’ll come to blows right there in front of both their fleets. But then Hannibal says quietly, “Good work, little brother,” and just like that, Hasdrubal’s expression softens, and they hug.

What with one thing and another, Scipio doesn’t get Hannibal to himself until twilight is shading towards dawn. The hangar is quiet, and only the guards on fourth watch are still awake. He’s in the cockpit of his new ship, fiddling with the masking systems to see if he can pull off the digital camouflage trick, when the door slides open and Hannibal comes in. He stops in the entryway for a second, watching Scipio at the array of dials and displays. “I can’t believe my brother gave you one of his elephantines.”

“We bet each other we couldn’t get across the Alps faster than you did,” says Scipio. “He got my hovercraft, I got his ship.”

He pats the dashboard. The elephantine churrs sleepily, and blinks the half-lidded eye of its main oxygen vent. “Yes, I can see how eager you both were to outdo me,” says Hannibal, in the crisp-edged voice Scipio has missed so much. “One day you must tell me how you ran the blockade at New Carthage by landing the _Neptune_ in a lagoon.”

The weight of their hasty leavetaking four years ago presses in on them like a third body in the room, skewing their orbits in strange and unpredictable ways. Hannibal’s guarded face gives away nothing, and Scipio can’t tell whether to pick up where they left off, or start over from scratch. He opts for a failsafe. “I’ll reenact it for you,” he says, “if you show me how you got chased off from Nola three times.”

The jibe has its intended effect. Hannibal smiles—only a loose approximation of his old buoyant smile, to be sure, but at once the cockpit feels several degrees warmer. “There were extenuating factors,” he says. “Though I won’t deny, it’s been a thoroughly unpleasant year.”

He’s shed his flight suit, keeping only the sleeveless undershirt beneath. It’s an homage of sorts, coming aboard another captain’s ship as a civilian. Scipio picks out a few new scars marring the exposed skin of his arms and collarbones—two close-range knife wounds, and a long trailing laser-burn still raised and livid over the old marks of the shoulder injury from the time he saved Capua. The sight is troubling. Scipio has had his own fair share of close shaves, but there remains a primitive, boyish part of him that wants to believe Hannibal invulnerable, and flinches from all evidence to the contrary. 

“You kept my family safe while I was away,” he says. “Thank you.”

“You seem to have done the same for mine,” says Hannibal. “I think we’re even.”

The elephantine stirs in its sleep, jolting the cabin sideways, and with a spacefighter’s long-trained reflexes they grab hold of each other to keep from reeling apart in subplanetary gravity. Neither of them lets go, after. “So,” says Hannibal, “like Polycrates, my lucky ring comes back to me.”

Scipio traces the line of the laser-burn from shoulder to neck with the tip of a knuckle. “Did you doubt me? I feel I ought to be offended.”

“Don’t be,” says Hannibal. “You might have noticed, I don’t have the best luck with reinforcements. Besides—”

He glances down, and the easy flippancy leaves his voice. “You were gone a long time.”

The truth of it floods through the room like the rush of a pent-up breath. “I know,” says Scipio, with a savagery that astounds even him. “By Jupiter, I know.”

He does not have to tell Hannibal how weary he is, how homesick he’s been, how close and how often they’ve skirted the edge of disaster. They are even on that score, too. Time lies heavy on those who sail to battle across the cosmos, a phenomenon no theory of relativity has ever been able to explain, and he feels worn beyond his twenty-nine years. “This will all be over soon,” he says. “Then we can rest.”

Hannibal tilts his head a little, as if considering a complex theoretical model. “What would you do, after the war?”

Scipio remembers the first winter Hannibal spent at his father’s manor after Cannae, when they’d seen each other every day: tinkering with Surus’ controls, or sketching out elaborate flight paths in the library, or walking through the streets of Capua, Scipio pointing out his favourite taverns and theatres and the porches where the oddest philosophers held court, and letting Hannibal interrogate him on the laws and ways of the city. He imagines Hannibal returning the favour after the war, showing him about the landmarks and spectacles of Carthage, and a coil of warmth settles deep in his belly.

“If you ask me,” he says, “I could come up with a few ideas.”

“So could I,” says Hannibal.

His hands curl softly in the hollows above Scipio’s hipbones. Scipio smiles. There has always been a strange telepathy between them, body and mind. “That settles it, then,” he says. “In the meantime, let’s go march on Rome.”

 

 

**iv. 205 BCE**

They do.

First there is a space battle, and then a ground battle, and then a bitter siege, and then a lot of old men in togas at the negotiation table, bargaining over ships and gold and Sardinia while Hannibal and his brothers listen politely like the three heads of a very bored Cerberus, and Scipio tries not to laugh.

In short, everything goes according to plan. 

 

 

**v. epilogue**

“It’s smaller than I remember,” says Hannibal. 

Scipio makes an incredulous noise. The triple walls of Carthage’s famous circular hangar are so immense, they can see them from out in orbit. “You haven’t been here since you were tiny.” 

“True,” says Hannibal. Scipio can barely hear him over the noise of their spectacular re-entry through the atmosphere, searchlights strobing, elephantines trumpeting, paeans blaring from every loudspeaker. “What do you think?”

Almost a full year has passed since the last skirmish on the Capitoline. Scipio presses his nose to Surus’ porthole, peering down at the blue marble of a water planet where Queen Dido, first and finest of the Tyrian spacefarers, once enclosed a hill in a strip of cowhide. “If I were looking for a place to call home,” he says, “I’d settle here, too.” 

That makes Hannibal smile. “Speaking of which, I’ve got it.”

“Hmm?”

“Your name. How would you like to be called Africanus?” 

As they burst through a cloud bank, the ruddy glow of the supergiant sun catches on the bronze crenellations on the hangar’s sandstone walls, dashing glints of dazzling light across the ocean. It’s nothing like Capua, but it’s still one of the most beautiful things Scipio has ever seen. “You mean, on account of all the time I’ll be spending here?”

“Why else?”

The guns on the Byrsa fire once in unison, a salute for the city’s victorious sons. Surus returns the greeting with an empty round from his trunk. Scipio grins. It’s not quite the triumphal procession he’d imagined for himself as a boy, drilling with the legions on the Campus Martius, but it’s a good one nonetheless. “I’d like that,” he says. “Very much.”

Hannibal bumps his shoulder fondly. They twine their fingers together on the tiller, and guide their ship towards ground.

**Author's Note:**

> This was immensely fun to research and write, and I honestly have enough headcanons about this 'verse to fill a novel—which is all to say that I've written at least one companion piece from Hannibal's POV that I might post after author reveals, if I do.
> 
> Some historical tl;dr (please, feel free to skip this if you’re not interested in gratuitous Punic Wars nerdery):
> 
>   * Why Capuan!Scipio? Capua was the first major city to go over to Hannibal during his Italian campaign, and stayed loyal until the Romans besieged and retook it in 211 (Hannibal’s feint on Rome was unsuccessful in reality, though I’ve given him a bit more luck here). Also, the Romans liked to denigrate the Capuans as decadent, luxury-loving philhellenes, which I couldn’t help but note are the same accusations they levelled against Historical!Scipio.
>   * Hannibal actually stayed with Pacuvius and Sthenius during his winter in Capua. The plot to stab him at dinner was stopped by Pacuvius’ own father, who told his son that “it is through my breast that you must lunge at him and stab him”.
>   * After Cannae, Historical!Scipio did swear an oath never to abandon Rome, and made a bunch of would-be deserters swear it with him at swordpoint. I figured Capuan!Scipio would be every bit as Extra. (Historical!Scipio then went on to campaign in Spain, where he took New Carthage, defeated Hannibal’s brothers, and drove the Carthaginians entirely out of the province in about four short years. I’ve tried to give his Capuan counterpart the same degree of badassery, except, you know, for the other side.)
>   * _Hannibal ad portas:_ “Hannibal is at the gates”, a Latin proverb for all your imminent catastrophe needs.
>   * Hasdrubal did in fact cross the Alps in 207—faster than Hannibal and with fewer casualties—but was defeated (and decapitated) by Claudius Nero at the Metaurus, and his reinforcements never reached Hannibal.
> 

> 
> ETA: I'm [enemyofrome on tumblr](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com)


End file.
